Agency tip: add reputation management to your SEO services

As a digital marketing agency, you want to offer your clients a set of solutions. This can ensure clients continue to use your services long term. You can achieve this by adding reputation management services for clients currently using your SEO and SEM services. As you position reputation management alongside other services, your clients will see even better results as search engines now consider online reputation a significant SEO signal.

Positioning online reputation management services alongside SEO and SEM services won’t just increase the likelihood of signing new customers, it can also become an ongoing service with lasting value. That translates into long-term clients. Yes, reputation management is a lot to tackle. But with the right partner technology, you won’t need to hire additional staff to take care of the additional responsibilities. Reputation management can drastically enhance the effectiveness of your other services. Just make sure the solution you choose to add includes all the important components.

Review generation

– Everyone loves positive reviews, search engines included. Reviews tell Google that a business is legit. Positive reviews tell Google the business is high-quality, moving it up in search results. Enough positive reviews help a business stand out in organic search with rich snippets (star ratings beside the listing in search results), and in paid search with Google Seller Ratings. The number of reviews and their average star rating aren’t all you should focus on though. Both customers and search engines prefer recent reviews, typically those written within the last 6 months. This means you need a solution that helps your clients generate new reviews on a consistent basis.

Review management

– As these new reviews come in, it’s important to have a strategy in place to manage them. This means a system to monitor and respond to both the positive and the negative in real-time, from one place. One negative review could deter dozens of prospective customers, but the right response could minimize that damage. Once you have this system in place, make sure you understand best practices for responding to negative reviews, as well as a reporting tool to track the progress of your clients’ reviews and ratings over time and by source.

Review marketing

– Getting new positive reviews is just the first step — albeit an important one. Next, you need a way to automatically promote those great reviews to a wider audience. You’ll want to promote them on your client’s company website, social media channels, and SEM ads as Google Seller Ratings. Happy customer voices are the most powerful advertisement, so put them to use!

Social media monitoring

– Reviews aren’t the only way customers express their opinions about businesses. Social media is often home to longer, more detailed conversations involving multiple customers. And left unattended, these conversations can spread like wildfire. To get an accurate picture of your client’s online reputation, you need to take social media into account. If the conversation is overwhelmingly negative, even your best SEO efforts may be futile. With hundreds of websites and thousands of mentions to sift through, this can be a tedious process. Look for a service that provides comprehensive social media management. This means monitoring all social channels, blogs, discussion forums, and news articles, as well as engaging with these conversations and publishing posts of your own.

Customer satisfaction insights

– To really set your clients up for success, you need to be aware of what their customers think about their services or products — before they write about it on social media or review websites. When done right, conducting surveys can give your customers critical customer insights they need to improve their business. A tool like BirdEye’s survey designer lets businesses create custom surveys designed to fit the customer’s attention span, leading to higher completion rates and more accurate data.

Small businesses aiming to grow want a digital marketing agency that doesn’t just move them to the top pages of search results, but also keeps them there. Standard SEO and SEM services are a necessary starting point to help businesses move up in rankings. Reputation management services both accelerate that ascent and deliver sustainable success that boosts customer retention. For example, check out BirdEye’s solution for small businesses:

If you’re considering supercharging your services with reputation management, test the BirdEye platform yourself with a free trial account or contact our team at 1-888-289-0487 to see how BirdEye can give you and your clients an edge over the competition.

About the author

Anupam Jolly

Anupam is a Reputation Management and Customer Experience specialist at BirdEye with over a decade of experience in digital marketing. Expert in driving traffic growth through organic channels like SEO and social media.